When the news came out last month that a New York woman was likely cured of HIV/AIDS by the same cord blood transplant she had received to save her from leukemia, Dr. Filippo Milano’s telephone at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center began to ring.
The unnamed New York patient had been given a transplant in August 2017 using donated umbilical cord blood with genes naturally resistant to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The transplant cured her cancer, as anticipated, and more than four years later her doctors at Weill Cornell Medicine are confident it cured her HIV as well.
Although HIV is a treatable condition for those who have access to antiviral drugs, as soon a person stops that treatment, the virus rebounds. Four-and-a-half years post-transplant, and with no detectable virus 14 months after stopping her drugs, the New York patient appears to be only the third person ever cured of HIV, which has infected 80 million worldwide since 1981.
For Milano, the story was electrifying and well-timed. He was not surprised that doctors and potential patients began calling him.
As director of the Hutch’s Cord Blood Transplant Program, he also had been working for years to launch a clinical trial of a similar approach that might cure patients of both leukemia and HIV.
The trial had only recently cleared its final authorizations. It is to begin enrolling this month.
